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International Trotsky Conferences

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Features about international Trotsky conferences
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International Conference
 The Trotsky-Stalin Conflict and Russia in the 1920s
  (Garden City, NY [USA], March 9-10, 1979)

The International Conference The Trotsky-Stalin Conflict and Russia in the 1920s was the first of a considerable number of international Trotsky conferences, congresses, symposia and similar events during the last two and a half decades. It was held at the Ruth S. Harley University Center, Adelphi University, Garden City, NY, on March 9-10, 1979, marking the centennial of the births of both Trotsky and Stalin. The conference was organized and presented by The Long Island Seminar on the Russian Revolution, founded in 1975 to bring together scholars interested in the revolution and modern Russian and Soviet studies. The conference was co-sponsored by Adelphi University, Garden City, NY, and by Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY. Robert Devlin and George D. Jackson functioned as conference directors, Natalie Datlof as conference coordinator. Some 20 major papers and keynote addresses were read and discussed during the two-day conference within the framework of 5 panels (Political struggle, Economics, Literature and art, Theory and ideology, International communism) chaired by Robert H. McNeal, Robert C. Stuart, Elizabeth Valkenier, Fred Weinstein, and Robert J. Alexander. The conference was accompanied by the opening of a poster art exhibit.
Some 25 scholars from the U.S., Britain and Israel actively participated in the conference,  contributing papers or functioning as chair-commentators: Robert J. Alexander, Roy Berkeley, James T. Burnett, Anthony D’Agostino, Robert V. Daniels, Donald A. Filtzer, Dan N. Jacobs, Vitaly Komar, David S. Law, Warren Lerner, Emanuel Levy, Robert H. McNeal, Hillel H. Ticktin, Laszlo M. Tikos, Robert C. Tucker, Nicholas S. Weber et al. Unfortunately, the publishing of the conference proceedings - originally scheduled for 1980 - was definitively canceled some two years later.

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Convegno Internazionale di Studi
 in Occasione del 40° Anniversario della Morte di Leon Trockij
  (Follonica [Italy], Oct. 7-11, 1980)

The Convegno Internazionale di Studi in Occasione del 40° Anniversario della Morte di Leon Trockij [International Study Meeting on the Occasion of the 40th Anniversary of Leon Trotsky’s Death] took place in Follonica, a small town situated on the Italian Mediterranean coast (province of Grosseto, Tuscany region) about an hour south of Pisa. Follonica is situated in that part of Italy which in the 1970s and 1980s was known as the red belt because the communists and socialists had its strongholds there. The conference was promoted by the renowned Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli [Feltrinelli Foundation, Milan], Giuliano Procacci acting as scholarly director. According to Livio Maitan the idea of organizing such a symposium was born and pushed by Alfonsi Leonetti (a Trotskyist in the 1930s and later a long-time member of the Italian CP) and by Fausto Bucci (director of the communal library of Follonica).
Most remarkable with regard to this 5-day symposium is the fact that it was  indirectly sponsored by the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiana, Italian Communist Party) which dominated those bodies which officially organized the conference: the Regione Toscana, Comune di Follonica, Provincia di Grosseto, and Biblioteca Comunale di Follonica. A communist party providing the hotel accomodations and meals and partly even paying the airfare of the Trotsky conference participants from abroad – unthinkable a couple of years earlier. However, during the 1970s the PCI had become the leading force of what was then called eurocommunism and the largest non-governing communist party in the world gaining some 35% of the popular vote in general elections and searching for a historical compromise (a participation in a national centre-left coalition government) with the populist DC (Democrazia Cristiana [Christian Democrats]) governing Italy since World War II. Thus, while the neo-Stalinist Soviet Communist Party and its international sister parties continued to ‘expose’ Trotsky and Trotskyism as counter-revolutionary, dangerous, adventurist and so forth, the Italian communists organized a scholarly symposium on this very un-person! By doing so, the PCI undoubtedly could polish up its new, open-minded and democratic image.
About 100 persons attended this international conference on Trotsky, thus being the biggest such event having taken place until then. The conference participants came from Italy, Germany (West), France, Britain, Spain, Austria, Australia, the United States, Israel and elsewhere – a truly international gathering. However, guests from the Eastern bloc, although invited, were not present at the symposium; it appears quite strange that Ernest Mandel, the internationally known Marxist economist and leader of the Fourth International (United Secretariat), had not been invited to attend.
Some forty major papers and co-reports were presented at the 5-day conference on Trotsky’s thought and action, each day of which was devoted to one of the following themes: Trotsky’s political and cultural thought, Trotsky and Lenin, Trotsky and the Russian revolution(s), Trotsky and Soviet economy, Trotsky and socialism in one country, Trotsky and the Fourth International. Although the conference – according to some observers and critics – could add little new to the understanding of Trotsky’s thinking, life and struggle, it was an attempt to study these subjects on a solid scholarly basis and to bring together a great variety of persons with regard to their political affiliations and viewpoints: established ‘bourgeois’ university professors (historians, political scientists), specialists in the field of Sovietology and Trotskology, a considerable number of Italian PCI members (or, close sympathizers), some devoted scholars associated with Trotskyist parties, institutes or journals, as well as some younger researchers. For a fairly complete listing of the contributing participants see below. Other persons participating in the conference but not contributing papers include Domenico Sedran, Vittoria Gervasini and other veterans of Italian Trotskyism, Jean Van Heijenoort (former secretary and guard to Leon Trotsky), Tamara Deutscher (the widow of Trotsky biographer Isaac Deutscher) et al.
The special importance of the Follonica conference lay in the fact that it was convened and actively supported by members and associates of the PCI; this communist participation helped to break down the wall of silence and slander erected and uphold by the Stalinists in order to purge Trotsky’s thought and the Trotskyist movement from the international socialist and workers’ movement once and for all. It should be mentioned that the conference took a final motion requesting from the Soviet government to act in the spirit of the Helsinki Accord, to make available Trotsky’s works in Soviet libraries, to open up and to make accessible all library and archive holdings related to his work and action. The Follonica conference marked a big step forward towards Trotsky’s rehabilitation.
The Follonica conference met great interest in the Italian press; the conference as well as the proceedings volumes published two years after the event were dealt with and reviewed by various participants, observers and scholars (see below).

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Coloquio Trotsky, Revelador Político del México Cárdenista
  (México, D.F. [México], May 18-22, 1987)

An international colloquium on Trotsky, political revealer of the Mexico of Lázaro Cárdenas, attended by some 30 active participants from Mexico, the United States, France, Australia and other countries, took place at the Universidad Autonoma de México, Mexico City, on May 18-22. The colloquium was directed by Olivia Gall, a distinguished Mexican scholar who in 1986 had submitted a magistral PhD thesis (directed by Pierre Broué) on Trotsky y la vida política en el México de Cárdenas. The papers read at the conference chiefly focused on Trotsky’s residence in Mexico (1937-40), Mexican politics during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas, communist and Trotskyist movements in contemporaneous Mexico and on the relation of Mexican intellectuals to Leon Trotsky.
Among the scholars and (ex-)Trotskyists giving talks or presenting films at the Mexico conference were Olivia Gall, Pierre Broué, Adolfo Gilly, Adolfo Zamora, Esteban Volkov, Alex Buchman, Enrique Avila Carrillo, Peter Katel, David Weiss, Teresa Aguirre, Octávio Rodríguez Araujo, Barry Carr, Charles Curtiss, Felix Ibarra, Octávio Fernández Vilchis, Manuel Aguilar Mora, Ricardo Pérez Montfort, Carlos Monsivais, Carlos Cordova, Susan Weissman, Julián Méza, Laurette Sejourne, Victor Durand, Vlady Kibalchich, Eugenia Revueltas, Olivier Debroise, George Novack, Alejandro Gálvez Cancino, Laurette Orfila, and Evelyne Laroche.

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Jornadas Trotsky Hoy
(Madrid [Spain], Jan. 30 - Febr. 3, 1989)

This conference was co-organized by the Fundación Andreu Nin, the Alianza Francésa and the Instituto Francés. Jorge Semprún, Minister of Culture, José Prat, president of the Ateneo de Madrid, and Trotsky’s grandson Esteban (Vsevolod) Volkov attended the opening of the conference on January 30. In the Ateneo de Madrid, under the topics of Trotsky hoy, El pensamiento de León Trotsky, and La rehabilitación de Trotsky y la perestroika, oral presentations were made by Pierre Broué, Alain Krivine, Vicent Garcés, Enrique del Olmo, Fernando Claudín, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Jaime Pastor and Esteban Volkov. On February 2, a book presentation by Pierre Broué, Marguerite Bonnet and Alain Dugrand took place at the Biblioteca Nacional, and on February 3 a documentary film by Alain Dugrand and Patrick Le Gall was presented at the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

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Internationales Symposium
 Leo Trotzki - Kritiker und Verteidiger der Sowjetgesellschaft
(Wuppertal [Germany], March 26-29, 1990)

On March 26-29, 1990 – some 50 years after the assassination of Trotsky and against the backdrop of the growing turmoil within the USSR and the on-going collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe – an international scientific symposium on the general theme of Leon Trotsky - critic and apologist of the Soviet society took place in Wuppertal (West Germany), under the auspices of the town’s university. It was not only the biggest hitherto held Trotsky conference, but – most remarkably – the very first one which was attended not only by Western scholars but by a considerable number of participants from the USSR, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, the GDR [at this time in the process of dissolution and unification with the Federal Republic of Germany], and the People’s Republic of China, too, thus being the first international Trotsky symposium in the truest sense of the word.
The idea of such a symposium originated from an international symposium on the 100th anniversary of Nikolai Bukharin’s birth, held also Wuppertal in 1988. The true brain of both Wuppertal conferences was Theodor Bergmann, a German professor emeritus and a veteran of the Bukharinist-Brandlerite pre-war communist (‘right’) opposition, who together with the academics Gert Schäfer, Hans Kuhne, Günter Rexelius, Pierre Broué and Helmut Dahmer formed a preparatory committee charged with the organization of this important 1990 Trotsky conference which – according to some critics [for reports about the conference and criticism see below] – unfortunately suffered from various organizational and financial shortcomings and difficulties. The atmosphere of the Wuppertal symposium was described by conference participant Ernest Mandel as undogmatic, relaxed and lively, characterized by an open and pluralist spirit, lacking bitter polemics or personal attacks. Other conference participants, however, criticised besides financial mismanagement and shortcomings in organization and moderation that there was too little time for serious political debate, missing translations and – with regard to the proceedings volume published in 1993 – the facts that this book contained only less than a half of the papers presented at the symposium [see below] and that the selection criteria were not at all plausible. At least, almost all participants considered as truly positive feature of the Wuppertal symposium the fact that it allowed people interested in Trotsky research from four continents to get acquainted with each other.
The symposium addressed three main themes: Trotsky’s role in the USSR from the October revolution to his expulsion from the country in 1929, Trotsky’s contributions to the analysis of the Soviet state and society, and Trotsky’s place in the development of Marxism. However, there were several contributions dealing with topics outside this schedule, thus for instance with Trotsky in recent Soviet historiography (e.g. the remarkable contrubutions by K. Herbst and M. Cox), Trotsky and the Spanish revolution, Trotsky and morality, Trotsky and the women’s question, Trotsky and the Chinese revolution, etc.
Altogether some 130 scholars, students, long-time activists and theorists of the Trotskyist movement took part in the 4-day symposium which was directed by above-mentioned Theodor Bergmann and opened by Soviet historian A. Antonov-Ovseenko, son of one of those outstanding old Bolsheviks liquidated during the great Stalinist purges of the 1930s.

The conference participants came from 21 countries: USSR, USA, Canada, Germany (Federal Republic and German Democratic Republic), Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, The Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Brazil, Mexico, China (People’s Republic), Israel. The majority of the participants were historians, sociologists, economists, political scientists, literary scholars and other academics of various political and ideological affiliation, ranging from conservatism to revolutionary Marxism, and approaching their subject in a quite different manner (revisionist, apologetic, ‘objective’).  While some of the participants were already well-known as authors of relevant books and articles on Trotsky, Trotskyism and on sovietology, others – particularly those from the USSR and other (hitherto) countries of ‘real existing socialism’ – were quite unknown at the time of the conference, at least in the West. Only a couple of years before, some participants (e.g. N.A. Vasetskii from the USSR and Monty Johnstone from Britain) were known as authors of works which were correctly labeled as examples of ‘Trotskyist demonology’; now at Wuppertal these former apologists of neo-Stalinist anti-Trotskyism gave a chastened impression, their contributions being characterized by a strong undercurrent of self-criticism.
Besides Western scholars and sovietologists on the one side and Russian, Chinese and other Eastern academics on the other side, a considerable number of devoted Trotskyists – both scholars and activists, and most of them long-time members or close sympathizers of one of the various currents of contemporaneous international Trotskyism – attended the conference, too: Ernest Mandel, Mikhalis Raptis [better known as Michel Pablo], Livio Maitan, Pierre Broué, Manual Aguilar Mora, Jesus Albarracín, Mike Goldfield, Ludwik Hass, Gregor Benton, Horst Lauscher, Michael Löwy, Marcel van der Linden, Jakob Moneta, François Moreau, Paolo Casciola, Jean-Jacques Marie, Hillel Ticktin, Tom Kemp.
Esteban Volkov, Trotsky’s grandson, attended the Wuppertal symposium, too, while some people whose attendance had been announced in the conference schedule factually did not participate for various reasons, e.g. T. Deutscher (widow of the Trotsky biographer Isaac Deutscher), A. Moscato, A. Gilly, D. Bensaïd, V.P. Danilov, K.K. Shirinia, A.V. Pantsov, G.G. Vodolazov [but he sent a written contribution], A. Di Biagio, E. Cinella, A. Kemp-Welch, T. Shanin, S. Thom.
Although more than 100 papers had been announced in the conference schedule, only some 70 persons actually attending the symposium had prepared written contributions (in various languages) of which some 60 could be orally presented and discussed at the conference, at least in an abridged or summarizing form. Some participants, however, gave only short oral presentations or contributed to the debates instead of providing papers. Unfortunately, only less than half of the original written contributions eventually have been published in the German-language proceedings volume which was edited by Theodor Bergmann and Gert Schäfer and which was published in 1993 [listing of contents see below]. Versions of some of the conference papers appearing in the just-mentioned volume have been published in other sources (journals, collective works, etc.), too [see below]; the same applies to a portion of those papers which the editors prefered not to include into the proceedings volume.
Here is a listing of those conference participants who prepared papers (some of which were designated as drafts or working papers) which were either sent in or circulated at the conference [for a list of original papers and drafts in our possession see below]: M. Aguilar Mora, A.V. Antonov-Ovseenko, B.H. Bayerlein, G. Benton, T. Bergmann, G. Bordiugov, M. Britovsek, P. Broué, Cai Kaimin, P. Casciola, M. Cox, E. Dainov, R.V. Daniels, V.A. Demichev, A. Durgan, Y. Felshtinsky, F. Firsov, M. Goldfield, P. Haferstroh, L. Hass, W. Hedeler, K. Herbst, M. Johnstone, A. Kalakhov, A. Kan, M. Keßler, H. Klein, B. Knei-Paz, R. Kößler, Iu. I. Korablev, V.A. Kozlov, S.A. Krasil’nikov, H. Lauscher, J. Lebedewa, H.-J. Lehnert, A. Lesnik, M. van der Linden, M. Löwy, L. Maitan, E. Mandel, J.-J. Marie, M. Mayzel, C. Merridale, G. Meyer, J. Moneta, F. Moreau, R. Müller, A. Podshchekol’din, Iu. Poliakov, M. Raptis [Pablo], M. Selden, J.C. Shapiro, V.I. Shishkin, L.M. Spirin, V.I. Startsev, H. Steiner, L.S. Szabó, H.H. Ticktin, E. Traverso, G. Trukan, N.A. Vasetskii, A.Iu. Vatlin, G.G. Vodolazov, A. Wald, J.L. Wallach, R. Wörsdörfer, Wu Jixue, Xu Tianxin, Yin Xuyi, A. Zavelchev, L. Zehender, Zheng Yifan, Zhou Maoyong, Zhou Shangwen.
Some three years after the Wuppertal symposium a selection of papers was published in Germany:

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International Conference Trotsky After 50 Years
(Aberdeen [Britain], July 31-Aug. 4, 1990)

On July 31 - August 4, 1990, a few days before the fiftieth anniversary of Trotsky’s assassination and only some 4 months after the Wuppertal (Germany) Trotsky symposium, another  international conference entitled Trotsky After 50 Years was held at King’s College, University of Aberdeen (Scotland, Britain). This Aberdeen conference was jointly organized by Aberdeen University’s History Department and by the Centre for Soviet and East European Studies. Terry Brotherstone, lecturer in history at the University of Aberdeen and Paul Dukes, director of the just-mentioned Centre, functioned as organizers and later took the responsibility for the selection and editing of the proceedings volume [see below]. The conference was financially sponsored by various institutions, e.g. by the Nuffield Foundation and the Ford Foundation. It took place just a week after another big international congress event held in Britain, the 4th World Congress of Soviet and East European Studiesat Harrogate.
The Aberdeen Trotsky conference – one in a veritable series of such events taking place in 1990 – was attended by around 50 people from 9 countries (Britain, USA, Canada, USSR, FRG, GDR, France, Sweden and Hungary), among them well-known American and Canadian professors who already had published books and articles on Trotsky, Trotskyism and Soviet affairs (e.g. R.V. Daniels, P. Pomper, R.B. Day), scholars from the USSR (e.g. B. Starkov, N.S. Tarkhova, S.V. Kudriashov, V.P. Buldakov), and some people associated either with the Trotskyist movement or with distinguished left journals (e.g. P. Broué, B. Hirson, H.H. Ticktin, A. Nove, T. Brotherstone). Spokesmen of the WRP (Workers Revolutuionary Party), one of the British Trotskyist groups, attended the conference, too, and took part in the discussions. A significant feature of the Aberdeen conference – as was also the case with regard to the Wuppertal symposium – was the attendance of a considerable number of representatives of Soviet social and historical sciences, thus allowing to open up discussions on Marxism across geographical boundaries and to make steps forward in clearing out the crudities and falsifications of Stalinism and of the Brezhnev era.
The conference was intended as a major contribution and encouragement to the development of discussion about Leon Trotsky, i.e. about various aspects of his political action, his legacy and his role in Soviet and world history, particularly in view of recent developments in the Eastern Bloc. In two sections altogether some 30 contributions were presented by the participants: to mention a few of them,
— P. Broué gave an account about problems of historiography with regard to his recently finished Trotsky biography;
— P. Pomper’s contribution dealt with the troubled relationship between Trotsky and the outstanding Menshevik leader Martov;
— R.B. Day featured a high-level paper comparing Trotsky’s dialectical approach to the methodology applied by most Marxists of the IInd International and by Lenin;
— M. Reiman dealt with Trotsky’s position within the highest echelons of the Russian CP in the early 1920s;
— A. Kan discussed Trotsky’s views of the national question;
— B. Hirson’s subject was Trotsky’s approach towards black nationalism;
— G. Benton presented a paper about Trotsky and Chinese matters;
— R.V. Daniels analyzed Trotsky’s conception of the world revolutionary process, while other participants made a focus on Trotsky’s views relating to the Soviet economic debates of the 1920s and early 1930s:
— A. Nove spoke about Trotsky and the NEP,
— H.H. Ticktin about Trotsky’s political economy of capitalism and
— A. Gueullette about Trotsky’s conceptions regarding the Soviet Union’s foreign economic relations.
The contributions of the conference participants from the Eastern Bloc of course met special interest and some of them brought indeed new factual material and some analytical insights:
— A.Iu. Vatlin presented his research on Trotsky and the Comintern in 1928,
— B.A. Starkov in his contribution on Trotsky and Riutin gave an account about the anti-Stalin resistance within the USSR in the early 1930s relying on Soviet archival material;
— M. Kun spoke about the political action of Trotskyists who had survived  the years of Stalinist terror;
— S.V. Kudriashov’s paper featured Trotsky’s views of the Second World War and his prognoses with regard to its aftermath;
— V. Bronshtein (one of a few relatives of Trotsky who had survived the Stalinist purges) presented a paper about the fate of Trotsky’s family and relatives in Stalinist Russia;
— N.S. Tarkhova gave an account about ‘Trotsky’s train’, i.e. about Trotsky’s political action and his writing during the time when as Commissar of War and Chief of the Red Army he lived in his ‘flying headquarters’, rushing from one front of the civil war to the other;
— Z.L. Serebriakova’s contribution dealt with her father’s relationship with Trotsky;
— G. Barr presented a paper on Trotsky's politics and revolutionary leadership.


Two years after the Aberdeen conference, a volume based on a selection of the contributions was published by Edinburgh University Press:

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Coloquio Internacional Trotsky –
Cincuentenario de su Muerte (1940-1990)
(México, D.F. [México], Aug. 20-24, 1990)

Exactly 50 years after Leon Trotsky had been murdered in his house at calle Viena, Coyoacán (then a suburb of Mexico City), an international colloquium was held at the Instituto del Derecho de Asilo y las Libertades Públicas which is located at avenida Río Churubusco 410, Coyoacán, next to the house where the murder took place and which is now the Museo Casa de León Trotsky. The five-day symposium was sponsored by the Departmento del Districto Federal (México) and was organized by Olivia Gall, Javier Wimer and Esteban (Vsevolod) Volkov, Trotsky's grandson who had been a boy of 14 when the assault on his grandfather's life in May 1940 and the eventual assassination in August the same year took place. Commemorating Trotsky's three and a half year presence in Mexico as an exiled man without a visa, the Mexico 1990 colloquium focused on México en los tiempos de Trotsky, Trotsky y el mundo contemporáneo, Trotsky en la URSS, Arte y revolución : una polémica de entreguerras, and Testimonios sobre Trotsky en México. A photographic exposition and the presentation of documentary films accompanied the colloquium in which scholars and Trotskyist veterans from Latin America, the United States and Europe (incl. Russia) actively participated, e.g. Manuel Aguilar Mora, Arturo Azuela, Adolfo Gilly, Adolfo Sánchez Rebolledo, Olivia Gall, Gabriel García Higueras, Pierre Broué, Marguerite Bonnet, Ernest Mandel, Aleksandr Podshchekoldin, Susan Weissman, Jake Cooper, Javier Wimer, Esteban (Vsevolod) Volkov, Octavio Fernández Vilchis, Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, Vlady Kibalchich, Eduardo Lizalde, Ernesto Gonzalez, Octavio Rodríguez Araujo, Francisco López Cámara. Unfortunately, many of the contributions to the colloquium remained unpublished as far as we know.

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Taller 'Trotsky como alternativa'
(Buenos Aires [Argentina], Nov. 14 and 29, 2002)

Some of the papers read at this conference, which was organized by the Centro de Estudios, Investigaciones y Publicaciones (CEIP) “Leon Trotsky”, were published in the following booklet:

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Journée d'Etude L'Histoire de l'Extrême Gauche Française :
 le Cas du Trotskisme, une Histoire Impossible?
(Dijon [France], June 5, 2002)

Wolfgang and Petra Lubitz
last rev. July 2010

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© by Wolfgang & Petra Lubitz 2004 —  http://www.trotskyana.net